Chris Womersley discusses his new novel Bereft

1. Can you tell our readers about your new novel?

Bereft is the story of a young man called Quinn Walker who meets a girl he comes to believe is the ghost of his murdered sister. Bereftis set in 1919 in outback Australia, during the Spanish flu pandemic which killed millions of people around the world. It is a ghost story and a love story.

2. When did you first know you wanted to write?

I was always a writer, even when I was quite young. I wrote a Star Wars sequel when I was about 12 or 13 that has since been lost. Tragic, I know. I wrote a bit in my 20s but it wasn’t really until my 30s that I decided to take it more seriously and attempt to finish a novel for once and for all, just to see if I could do it.

3. Given that your novel is set in the past, how much research did you have to do and how did you organise this?

Originally I had intended to write a contemporary novel, but as I began making notes I became intrigued by millennium movements. I began to cast about for a period when it might have been reasonable to believe the end of the world was nigh, and 1919 – with its Spanish flu pandemic, not to mention the wash-up of WWI - was a fascinating time. It was also a period when Spiritualism experienced a huge resurgence, which only added to its appeal as a setting; after all Bereft is, among other things, a ghost story. My research into the time consisted of reading a few general history books, to get a flavour of the period. Obviously some of the nuts and bolts facts had to be absolutely correct (where Quinn was likely to have fought in the war, what battalion and so on) but I wasn’t writing a history lesson. At its heart, Bereft is a story about a family and the way they manage their grief.

4. Where did you get the idea from 'Bereft' from?

The starting point of all my work is always character and story. The premise of Bereft is quite simple, but packed with questions about love and longing and the ways in which we deal with sorrow: What if a man met a girl he came to believe was the ghost of his dead sister? It was then a matter of building a story around that. The period of WWI was a time when belief in Spiritualism was widespread and played directly into the premise, which is obviously a ghost story as much as anything. Only after I had started writing Bereft did I realise that in examining one family’s experience of terrible loss, I was really writing about grief on a grand scale and how loss affected many families in the wake of the war.

5. Can you tell us about your future projects?

I have started a new novel, which is so far rather unformed at the moment. I can tell you, however, that it is a coming of age story about a young man who falls in with a gang of charismatic bohemians who rope him into a global art forgery scam. I think.

6. What is your writing process?

I treat writing as a job as much as I am able to. When I have a day for writing (between making a living and parenting etc) I try to sit down at 9AM and finish at 5PM, if I possibly can. Getting a novel up and running does involve a fair bit of contemplation (or - as my wife likes to call it – ‘staring out the window’). I use music a lot as a means to find my way into a scene, by which I mean that I try in my writing to approximate the pitch of a piece of music that captures the mood of what I am trying to do. With Bereft, I listened to Chopin Nocturnes a lot because they possess that lovely strain of melancholy I was hoping to evoke in the reader.

7. Can you give our readers any advice about becoming a writer?

Read as widely as you can and write as much as you can.

8. You have also written a horror story for Granta magazine, which genre do you prefer to write?

For me it is necessary to use whatever tools at my disposal to tell the story I need to tell. I don't really have a preference. It’s snobbish to disregard any genre or method of telling a story if that is going to work best. One needs to be flexible as a writer. I’ve written horror stories, crime stories, historical fiction – whatever piques my interest at that moment. What matters is that is is good.

Lucy Walton